Author: Andreas Agocs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108228593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Antifascism is usually described as either a political ideology of activists and intellectuals confronting the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, or as a cynical tool that justified the Stalinist expansion of communism in Europe. Andreas Agocs widens our understanding of antifascism by placing it in the context of twentieth-century movements of 'cultural renewal'. He explores the concept of 'antifascist humanism', the attempt by communist and liberal intellectuals and artists to heal the divisions of Nazism by reviving the 'other Germany' of classical Weimar. This project took intellectual shape in German exile communities in Europe and Latin America during World War II and found its institutional embodiment in the Cultural League for Democratic Renewal in Soviet-occupied Berlin in 1945. During the emerging Cold War, antifascist humanism's uneasy blend of twentieth-century mass politics and cultural nationalism became the focal point of new divisions in occupied Germany and the early German Democratic Republic. This study traces German traditions of cultural renewal from their beginnings in antifascist activism to their failure in the emerging Cold War.
Author: Andreas Agocs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108228138
Category : Anti-fascist movements
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Antifascism is usually described as either a political ideology of activists and intellectuals confronting the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, or as a cynical tool that justified the Stalinist expansion of communism in Europe. Andreas Agocs widens our understanding of antifascism by placing it in the context of twentieth-century movements of 'cultural renewal'. He explores the concept of 'antifascist humanism', the attempt by communist and liberal intellectuals and artists to heal the divisions of Nazism by reviving the 'other Germany' of classical Weimar. This project took intellectual shape in German exile communities in Europe and Latin America during World War II and found its institutional embodiment in the Cultural League for Democratic Renewal in Soviet-occupied Berlin in 1945. During the emerging Cold War, antifascist humanism's uneasy blend of twentieth-century mass politics and cultural nationalism became the focal point of new divisions in occupied Germany and the early German Democratic Republic. This study traces German traditions of cultural renewal from their beginnings in antifascist activism to their failure in the emerging Cold War.
Author: Martha Sprigge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197546323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
The Ruin -- The Socialists' Cemetery -- The Church -- Concentration Camp Memorials -- The Artists' Cemetery.
Author: Alexander Mathäs
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789205638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.
Author: Hana Worthen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030440664
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
This book examines the appropriation of theatre and theatrical performance by ideologies of humanism, in terms that continue to echo across the related disciplines of literary, drama, theatre, and performance history and studies today. From Aristotle onward, theatre has been regulated by three strains of critical poiesis: the literary, segregating theatre and the practices of the spectacular from the humanizing work attributed to the book and to the internality of reading; the dramatic, approving the address of theatrical performance only to the extent that it instrumentalizes literary value; and the theatrical, assimilating performance to the conjunction of literary and liberal values. These values have been used to figure not only the work of theatre, but also the propriety of the audience as a figure for its socializing work, along a privileged dualism from the aestheticized ensemble—harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the essentialized drama—to the politicized assembly, theatre understood as an agonistic gathering.
Author: Anna Koch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110672650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War's role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe's Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.
Author: Alice Goff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226827100
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
"This book tells the story of how Germans struggled to make art an autonomous instrument of social progress in the face of real-world challenges between 1790-1850. For philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller, a work of art was governed by its own laws and soared above trivial constraints; thus, a painting or sculpture could both model and stimulate the moral autonomy of its beholders. This "aesthetic education" (to be conducted in the newish institution of museums) would yield an "aesthetic state," born of the measured reason of its citizens rather than the fractious antagonisms of mobs and tyrants. But highbrows like Schiller failed to consider the tough realities facing art "on the ground." Not only were there no proper museums in the German states for presenting art to the public, the systematic looting of their art collections during the Napoleonic wars had thrown the very ontological status of art into serious question: What was a painted altarpiece supposed to be once it had been torn out of a Church and reinstalled in a secular space? How would a marble statue of a nude Apollo impact modern viewers-especially unmarried young ladies not used to such sights? And how could a stolen object symbolize freedom? As art works fell prey to the very violence they were supposed to transcend, social theorists began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could so quickly end up a spoil of war. Among the specimens considered are forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne in Aachen; the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; the Laocoön group from Rome; a bronze medieval reliquary from Goslar; a Last Judgment from Danzig; and, last, but surely not least, the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig"--
Author: Seth Howes
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 1640140689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years
Author: Ned Richardson-Little
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.
Author: Elizabeth Otto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501344803
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
A century after the Bauhaus's founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular. In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.
